Recent Articles

A new study by Jonathan Gruber, one of the ACA’s chief architects, suggests that roughly two-thirds of new Medicaid enrollees in 2014 were eligible for the program under previous state eligibility criteria—meaning that they were not made eligible by the ACA. Gruber’s results, combined with much higher than expected Medicaid enrollment and spending over the past three…

It is vital that the new Administration, Congress, and state officials orchestrate a smooth and methodical transition for the repeal of Obamacare. For this smooth transition to take place, Congress should act immediately to initiate repeal and the Administration should take aggressive administrative actions to stabilize the private market for the upcoming 2018 plan cycle.…

With Republicans controlling the White House and Congress in January, they’re faced with delivering on their long-time promise to repeal and replace the ACA. Because Republicans will control the Senate by just 52-48, the Senate will have to navigate the complex reconciliation rules processes to avoid filibusters, which require 60 votes to end. Their key…

The election of Donald Trump as president, along with the Republican Party’s retention of both houses of Congress, sets the stage for the long-promised repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), popularly known as Obamacare. Obamacare boosters warn that repeal would throw 20 million Americans who have gained health insurance coverage through the…

Recent economic research calls into question the value of ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion, and indeed the entire Medicaid program. In one study, MIT health economist Amy Finkelstein and her colleagues found that Medicaid produced no discernible improvement in enrollees’ measured physical health outcomes. In another, Finkelstein and colleagues estimated enrollees receive only 20-40 cents of benefit…

  The House of Representatives has asked the Federal Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to temporarily pause the House lawsuit challenging an ACA subsidy program, a move that could allow the incoming Trump administration to swiftly unwind the ACA exchanges. The House argues that the ACA did not fund payments to health insurance…

The Department of Health and Human Services finally released the 2015 Affordable Care Act risk corridor data. The data show the rapid deterioration of the ACA exchanges from 2014 to 2015. The ACA’s risk corridor program was intended to transfer funds from profitable insurers to unprofitable ones for the first three years of the exchanges (2014…

Thanks to all of the issues with our vast and complicated healthcare system, any attempts at reform will require massive amounts of effort, political capital, cooperation from various public and private entities and, likely, luck. So while Donald Trump ran on a platform of “repealing and replacing Obamacare”, it might be wise to start with…

Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress are vowing to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, the signature health care overhaul of President Obama. Trump has offered a few ideas of where he’d like to see a health care overhaul go, such as a greater reliance on health savings accounts, but he hasn’t provided a…

The GOP Congress and incoming Trump administration will need to make some decisions in the coming weeks on how to proceed with a legislative agenda in 2017. The course they choose to take is likely to define the rest of the Trump presidency, just as decisions President-elect Obama made in late 2008 and early 2009…